Wild Ducks Flying Backward (6 page)

And I venture that Kathy, an erudite woman with a library of wildlife manuals in her knapsack, is still puzzling over the blank stare the aging guide M’sengala had given her when she’d asked whether the rare hartebeest we’d spotted was Lichtenstein’s hartebeest or one of the other varieties. After that, M’sengala cracked up every time Jim and I inquired if we were looking at Rauschenberg’s wildebeest. Rosenquist’s bushbuck. Wesselman’s waterbuck. Catskill’s borschtbuck. Or Goldberg’s variations. Knowing not ten words of English, he couldn’t possibly savvy the cultural references, but M’sengala got the point.

Certainly M’sengala, with his goofy, infectious laugh, is in
my
thoughts. I’m remembering how shocked he’d looked when Curt had slipped the Sony Walkman headset over his leathery ears and turned up Huey Lewis and the News, and how quickly he’d begun to grin and then to dance, as if he could not stop himself from dancing. M’sengala got down! The Selous, itself, gets down. Down to basics, to the curious if natural rhythms of life.

And death. For if there’s abundant life in the Selous, there’s abundant death as well. We’d seen a pack of wild dogs cripple and devour an impala; a bloated hippo corpse being ripped to shreds by twenty crocodiles; the remains of a feline-butchered wildebeest, black clouds of flies buzzing like paparazzi around its instant celebrity of blood. We could hear those flies from thirty yards away.

Yes, there are ongoing dramas of death in the Selous, but except for the small amount imported by poachers, there’s no unnecessary violence, no greed, no cruelty. Nor is there politics, religion, trendiness, ambition, hype, or sales pitch. Perhaps it’s the very purity of the Selous that makes us cling to it, reluctant to let go.

For two weeks, we have traveled in the realm of the eternal. There is escape from the prison of the past, disinterest in the promise of the future. There is no other place. The Selous is
here
. There is no other time. The Selous is
now
.

And as we lie in our tents on the grassy plain of eternity it must occur to each and every one of us that the Selous is the way the world was meant to be—and that everything else is a mistake.

Nonetheless, we do return to carpeted home and electronic hearth, and I have to tell you, folks, now that I’m back, I’m ready for a nap. If it should prove that a tsetse fly has, indeed, drugged my vital fluids, then, O river gods, grant me a graceful fall into the sleep of the Selous. The bright slumber of Africa. The snooze of Kilimanjaro.

Esquire,
1985

TRIBUTES

The Doors

A
s clueless as Rome before the barbarians stormed its gates, as oblivious as Pompeii on the eve of Vesuvius’s genocidal belch, Seattle was totally unprepared for the rape and pillage to which its youth were subjected at Eagles Auditorium last night. Neither was it ready for the anointment, the empowerment, or the sanctification that were also part and parcel of a rock concert cum psychic ordeal cum full-blown ecstasy rite.

For some time now, Seattle’s adopted “house” bands have been The Youngbloods and Country Joe & the Fish, groups whose electrical bananas may shock straight society but who, to their fans, are as folksy and affectionate as psychedelic puppies. Accustomed to having their faces licked, Seattleites were caught off guard by a band that, while it might sniff a crotch or two, definitely does not wag its tail; by a band that embodies the prevailing zeitgeist, with all of its political optimism, spiritual awareness, and liberating transcendence of obsolete values, but embodies it with an unprecedented potency, concentration, and theatrical vehemence; a band that flaunts rather than soft-pedals the threat that the new culture presents to the old culture—and that leaves both cultures rather reeling from the experience.

When, dazed but fomented, we staggered at last from the hall last night, we were each and every one under the spell of four musicians who, innocuously enough, call themselves after simple, ubiquitous, utilitarian devices intended for the closing off or opening up of architectural spaces.

Yes, that would be doors. But, my God, what doors are these?! Imagine jeweled glass panels, knobs that resemble spitting phalluses, mail slots that glow like jack-o’-lantern lips—and not a welcome mat in sight. Enter if you dare, my children, exit if you can.

The Doors. Their style is early cunnilingual, late patricidal, lunchtime in the Everglades, Black Forest blood sausage on electrified bread, Jean Genet up a totem pole, artists at the barricades, Edgar Allan Poe drowning in his birdbath, Massacre of the Innocents, tarantella of the satyrs, bacchanalian, Dionysian, L.A. pagans drawing down the moon.

The Doors. The musical equivalent of a ritual sacrifice, an amplified sex throb, a wounded yet somehow elegant yowl for the lost soul of America, histrionic tricksters making hard cider from the apples of Eden while petting the head of the snake.

The Doors. The intensity begins the moment they stalk on stage and it doesn’t let up until the purge is over, the catharsis complete. Even between numbers, there is no relaxation: no chitchat, no pandering, no horsing around. Like the classical actors of Japan, The Doors project all the more intensity when they are silent. They even tune up with an involvement so fierce it would scare The Mamas & The Papas out of their mama pants and papa pants.

The Doors. Their voice is dark and bloody, a voice from the bowels. Satanic in combustion, devouring in energy, awesome in spirit. The voice of Nietzsche, stopped short in terror, succumbing to madness, lusting for the salvation of flesh. The Brechtian voice of the Berlin Music Hall, warning a new generation of the rising tide of American fascism. A voice soaked with a rabid rage of destruction—yet neither wanton nor negative. Like Shiva, the Divine Destroyer of the Hindu, The Doors kill only to clear the way for rebirth; they evoke the eternal rhythmic balance of life and death, darkness and light—because the doors that really matter always swing both ways.

Four Doors:

John Densmore, drums.
Perhaps the best drummer in all of rock. While most drummers seldom stray from the beat, Densmore crosses the beat—in and out, back and forth, creating counter-beats and accentuating the off-beats. He not only provides The Doors with a fantastic complexity of percussion, he goads them into new time signatures and actually leads them along their epic melodic line.

Ray Manzarek, organ.
As authoritative as the Grateful Dead’s Pigpen, but far more sophisticated, he obviously cut his teeth on Bach. Manzarek flows through a field of variations and figurations as grandiose as the richest Baroque. One moment he is pliant and searching, the next he is tearing at the keyboard like a starving man ripping a chicken apart.

Robby Krieger, guitar.
With the drums and organ taking the lead, Krieger supplies a hard, unyielding rhythm that occasionally explodes into startling new disclosures of chord and modulation.

Jim Morrison, vocals.
Morrison begins where Mick Jagger and Eric Burdon leave off. An electrifying combination of an angel in grace and a dog in heat, he becomes intoxicated by the danger of his poetry, and, swept by impious laughter, he humps the microphone, beats it, sucks it off. Sexual in an almost psychopathic way, Morrison’s richly textured voice taunts and teases, threatens and throbs. With incredible vocal control and the theatrical projection of a Shakespearean star, he plays with the audience’s emotions like a mischievous child with its dolls: now I kiss you, my little ones, now I wring your necks.

The Doors are carnivores in a land of musical vegetarians. Their craftsmanship is all the more astonishing in the light of their savagery. They have the ensemble tightness of the Juilliard String Quartet—but their grandeur is not of the intellect but of warm red blood. Their stained talons, wet fangs, and leathery wings are seldom out of view, yet if they leave us crotch-raw and exhausted, at least they leave us aware of our aliveness. And of our destiny. The Doors scream into the darkened auditorium what all of us in the counterculture are whispering more softly in our hearts: We want the world and we want it………………………. NOW!

The Helix,
1967

Nurse Duffy of MTV

H
er name sounds like one of those blue-collar taverns frequented by sports goons and off-duty cops, her job title sounds like the end of World War II. But Karen Duffy—the reigning “VJ”—looks more like an erotic bakery specializing in anatomically correct cream puffs, and her workplace looks more like the end of the world. As we know it. And she feels… fairly mischievous.

Coming at us in short bursts—Stella by strobelight—Duff manages nevertheless to be funny, bright, vulnerable, and genuine; the girl next door as video vamp, the perfect counterpoint to the laser-and-leather looney bin of MTV, over which she so jauntily presides.

Whether she is spinning Aerosmith’s propeller or tossing MC Hammer his tacks, she introduces the optic sizzle, the hip-hop histrionics, as if she were Little Red Riding Hood showing off her pet wolves. She has bravado to spare, but her whip is licorice, her nerves just a bit on edge. (Van Halen, what sharp teeth you have!)

If MTV is simultaneously decadent and fresh, technologically sophisticated and emotionally primitive, both an accomplice to the apocalypse and its antidote, then who better than a former recreational therapist at a nursing home to reign over its sphere of paradoxical power? With alley-cat eyes,
pâtisserie
figure, Cubistic haircut, and a grin wide enough to put Julia Roberts’s cat out through, Karen Duffy is capable of playing succubus to a generation of alienated young men. She is equally suited to be every patient’s favorite candy striper in the rehab wards of a poisoned land.

So let’s doff to Duff, let’s quaff to Duff: a juicy burr under the stiff saddle of American puritanism; a witty companion in many a lonely, cathode-lit room; the reassuring wink at the center of a billion-dollar ’round-the-clock hallucination spawned by the uneasy marriage of commerce and art.

Esquire,
1992

Joseph Campbell

O
ne humid, hammer-heavy morning seven years ago, on the ceremonial grounds of Chichen Itza, I watched a small coral snake slither from a pile of Mayan rubble and shoot through the grass like a rubber arrow in the direction of a group of my traveling companions. The snake singled out one man from the group, crawled deliberately up to the toe of his conservative, urban shoe, paused there for a long moment, then veered sharply to the right and disappeared into another heap of ancient stones.

That tiny incident would have been mildly interesting at best had not the man whom the snake “visited” been Joseph Campbell.

Professor Campbell had been regaling our party with some story or other, and gave no indication of having even noticed the little serpent. Yet I was convinced that something had passed between them.

Did the snake lick the tip of Joseph Campbell’s shoelace, changing it into jade?

Was the snake carrying a tarot card under its tongue? Was it carrying a pomegranate seed?

Had the snake wept? Had it sung? Were those purple feathers sprouting from its spine?

Would the serpent and Professor Campbell meet again late that evening—and would they sip mistletoe gin from a virgin’s skull while discussing details for the coronation of the Ant King?

Speculations such as those were hardly surprising. Joseph Campbell was so conversant with the world of wonders that he awakened the potential for wonder in everyone he touched. He unbuttoned the secret earth for us and let the inexhaustible inspiration of Being stream through.

Now, like heroes before him, he has vanished into the buttonhole. But he left the bright opening agape, allowing us free access to that heritage of raptures and terrors that he so valiantly resurrected, so vividly described.

In the months before his death last year at the age of eighty-three, Campbell was interviewed at length by journalist Bill Moyers. The result, a six-part series entitled
Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth,
is set to premiere on PBS later this month. It’s virtually impossible to overestimate the significance of this suite of hour-long broadcasts, or to overpraise its potential for, temporarily at least, exorcising the boob from the tube. It’s particularly significant at a time when the population is threatened by a potentially deadly epidemic of mythological origin. The plague to which I refer is not AIDS but millennialism.

Joseph Campbell was the world’s foremost mythologist. Early in his long life, he combined Sir James George Frazer’s discovery that strikingly similar motifs show up in the folktales of all the world’s cultures, with Carl Jung’s notion that myths are metaphors created to illuminate human experience. Thus, doubly inspired, Campbell became a maverick scholar, his books and lectures often scorned by academicians but adored by poets, painters, and enlightened psychoanalysts. His genius was not so much in his exhaustive scholarship, however, as in his intuitive recognition of the importance and relevance of myth to every living soul.

If “the proper study of man is man,” then mythology is the lens through which man is properly examined. Yet most of us, including the ostensibly well-educated, wouldn’t know a myth from a Pentagon press release. We’ve been taught to equate “myth” with “lie.”

In actuality, myths are neither fiction nor history. Nor are most myths—and this will surprise some people—an
amalgamation
of fiction and history. Rather, a myth is something that never happened but is always happening. Myths are the plots of the psyche. They are ongoing, symbolic dramatizations of the inner life of the species, external metaphors for internal events.

As Campbell used to say, myths come from the same place dreams come from. But because they’re more coherent than dreams, more linear and refined, they are even more instructive. A myth is the song of the universe, a song that, if accurately perceived, explains the universe and our often confusing place in it.

It is only when it is allowed to crystallize into “history” that a myth becomes useless—and possibly dangerous. For example, when the story of the resurrection of Jesus is read as a symbol for the spiritual rebirth of the individual, it remains alive and can continually resonate in a vital, inspirational way in the modern psyche. But when the resurrection is viewed as historical fact, an archival event that occurred once and only once, some two thousand years ago, then its resonance cannot help but flag. It may proffer some vague hope for our own immortality, but to our deepest consciousness it’s no longer transformative or even very accessible on an everyday basis. The self-renewing model has atrophied into second-hand memory and dogma, a dogma that the fearful, the uninformed, and the emotionally troubled feel a need to defend with violent action.

The potential for violence is especially high when humanity stands, as it does today, at a crossroads of myth and religio-political fanaticism. In twelve years we’ll enter a new millennium. On the millennial threshold, hordes of overly susceptible people tend to become swept up in feverish visions of “the end of the world.” The desire for a fresh start, for an end to worry, work, and personal responsibility, mixes with mad prophecy and with what author Eleanor Munro has called “faith in the Pilgrim Lord’s millennial return,” to produce volatile psychological anticipation.

In the past, humankind on the whole has successfully weathered those storms, but whenever a segment has failed to comprehend the essentially symbolic nature of apocalypse (as in Judea at the waning of the last millennium BC), genocide has resulted. Prophecy self-fulfilled. Munro asks the chilling question, “How far does this myth still affect political destiny, by implanting structures in the minds of millions that must be fulfilled in historic time?”

In other words, if we expect and/or secretly covet Doomsday, we can make it happen. Those strange bedfellows, the rigid ignoramuses of the religious right and the comet-chasing, earthquake-fancying, harmonic-convergence-befuddled innocents of the New Age, share a misinterpretation of eschatological legend that is downright scary in intensity and scope. In its passionate if misguided longing to transcend the disorderliness, friction, and unpredictability that characterize life, it strikes me as a death wish on a global scale—but one that could be reversed with a basic understanding of mythology.

The Moyers–Campbell series does not deal with the millennialism issue in any direct way, don’t let me mislead you, but by simply reintroducing us to the mythic underpinnings of our culture and consciousness, it can help yank us from the jaws of the dragon and set us down once more in the magnificent labyrinth whose twists and turns it is our sacred privilege to go on negotiating for millennia still to come.

In
Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth,
you will hear extraordinary stories told by a master storyteller, and you will see temples, art objects, and ceremonies you may have never seen before, as well as the antics of familiar heroes and heroines: astronauts, artists, actors, and athletes. Which is to say, the programs are entertaining as well as edifying.

They do tend to be visually static at times. It’s the nature of the medium. And while Moyers and Campbell play off one another fairly well, they’re not Wally Shawn and André Gregory. Nevertheless, there’re moments when Moyers, resembling a puckish George Bush, does seem to be having his mind blown during a scene from
My Dinner With Joe
. As interviews go, these are more conversational, less confrontational than many, but a subtly crisp dynamic does emerge.

What does not quite emerge is Campbell’s true personality. Oh, we get his twinkle, his halting eloquence, his robust but ever courtly assertiveness (a former world-class runner, he provides all aspiring octogenarians with an image to shoot for), but his private dimensions are left draped in opaque silks.

Well, so what? Perhaps we don’t need to know that Campbell was a dignified neo-Victorian gentleman, minus any trace of the sexual hang-ups associated with the type. Or that for the last forty years of his life he refused to read a newspaper and did not attend a motion picture until the day before his eightieth birthday when he sat through the entire
Star Wars
trilogy, one picture after the other. Or that socially he was barely to the left of William F. Buckley, harboring a withering contempt for the clamorings and phobias of the mindless masses. (Upon our return from Mexico, he vowed he’d never again set foot South of the Border: it was just too funky for him, too awash in lurid emotions.) He could appear haughty at times, but at his age and with his knowledge and accomplishments, he may be excused for not suffering fools gladly.

(And speaking of fools, you may have heard that there are thought police from our academic left who would tar the myth master with the anti-Semitic brush. This is hogwash. Far from attacking Jews, Campbell, an honest, uncompromising scholar, simply made the observation—non-arbitrarily and in proper context—that the ancient Hebrews failed to establish a high culture as did, for example, the Greeks, Egyptians, Chinese, Romans, Aztec, Inca, et al.; a nomadic people, they produced no great art, architecture, science, or centers of learning. What the Hebrews did do was engender, embellish, codify, and amplify Levantine legend, legend that still impacts the modern world, legend that Campbell spent a lifetime interpreting, if not always to the satisfaction of the sanctimonious.)

Despite his disappointment in contemporary humanity, however, Campbell maintained an enormous, contagious enthusiasm for what he called “the rapture of being alive.” That enthusiasm flares in the PBS series like a bonfire in a Druid glade. In fact, Campbell insisted that the Moyers interviews were not about meaning but experience, an experience of life in its whole geometric array of facets and phases.

So you watch this enlightening series, beginning to end. And after the final episode, you turn off your TV set. Moments later, a woodsman’s ax with blue eyes and a mossy handle flies in your bedroom window. Don’t be alarmed. True, it may want to marry you. On the other hand, it may have dropped by to invite you to the coronation of the Ant King. Accept, in either case. After all, as Joseph Campbell was fond of pointing out, “The myth is
you
.”

Seattle Weekly,
1988